What can people get for that? Basically, just junk food...which contributes to obesity
The following article from the NY Times explores some other aspects of this
Big City
Cutting the Lean From Food Stamps
Michael Kirby Smith for The New York Times
At the Cathedral Church of St.
John the Divine on Tuesday, advocates for the hungry initiated an
effort to stop planned cuts in food stamps. The clock showed the time
left before the cuts went into effect.
By GINIA BELLAFANTE
Published: October 4, 2013 188 Comments
Many years ago a Korean man named Francis An arrived in New York via
Argentina and observed that many communities in the city lacked the sort
of grocery stores that could supply immigrants with the foods they were
accustomed to in their native countries. He would eventually open a
chain of supermarkets under the corporate name Bogopa, which in Korean
means “yearning for you,” in low-income neighborhoods.
One of those stores, the Food Bazaar on East 161st Street in the Bronx,
is enormous, its shelves so wide and high and full that you feel as if
you’re inside an Andreas Gursky
photograph. Belying the image of the poor neighborhood as food desert,
produce is abundant — star fruit, dinosaur plums, brussels sprouts,
organic pomegranate juice — and so too are grains and ground meats free
of hormones, additives and so on.
When compared with an outfit like Western Beef, on West 16th Street,
which serves the adjacent Chelsea housing projects and has an entrance
through the junk-food aisle, the Food Bazaar is inspiring. The prices
are considerably more reasonable than they are in Manhattan and much of
Brooklyn. And yet what you quickly learn is that it still costs $4 for a
clamshell of organic salad greens in the poorest urban county in the
country.
If you live alone and receive $200 a month in food stamps (the maximum
the government allows for a single person and the equivalent of $2.30
per meal), your budget remains unlikely to accommodate baby spinach and
much of the healthy, essential, “good” food that in this city and so
much of the country has become its own religion, at the levels of both
culinary passion and public policy. We hail the fact that greenmarkets
accept electronic benefit transfer cards, but availability and
affordability are hardly tandem principles.
According to research by the Food Bank for New York City,
the price of food in the New York metropolitan area rose by 16 percent
between December 2007, the start of the recession, and the end of last
year, with 32 percent of New Yorkers in 2012 reporting difficulty paying
for the food they needed. Those dependent on government subsidies to
supply their tables will feel these increases more harshly as cuts to
the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (or SNAP, as the
food stamp program is called) go forward.
Before the government ceased operations, as you may recall, House Republicans were busy trying to ensure $40 billion in cuts to the program. Whatever further reductions are promulgated at the Congressional level will come in addition to predetermined cuts already scheduled to go into effect on Nov. 1.
The New York City Coalition Against Hunger
estimates that these cuts would amount to $205 million in New York City
alone, with a family of four, for instance, potentially receiving $36
less a month to spend on food. The cuts essentially scale back SNAP
benefits to levels set before the recession. The 2009 Recovery Act provided the program with an increase, which expires next month.
The irony of course, is that in a place like the Bronx, evidence of
recovery is not altogether obvious. Although 15,000 jobs were added in
the borough between 2007 and 2012, according to a recent report by the
state comptroller’s office, the average unemployment rate for the year
so far stands at 12.7 percent; in 2009 it was 11.9 percent.
These hardships are easily observed at the city’s SNAP offices near
Yankee Stadium, where lines are long (and where, in contrast to the
Bloomberg administration’s health-above-all-things ethos, the building
housing the offices also hosts an outpost of Checkers, purveyor of burgers, cheese steaks and a cheesecake-layered sundae).
One morning last week, Jermaine Isaac, a father of two, was applying for
food stamps because he had lost his job at a moving company. Elina
Salama, who described herself as a schizophrenic, spoke of how the end
of the month inevitably found her at the food pantry of a local church
because despite the efforts she makes at budgeting, her benefits don’t
cover the cost of food.
Another woman, who would give her name only as Carmen, was laid off as
an administrative assistant at a hospital in November 2011 and has been
looking for work ever since, she told me. She has a 10-year-old living
at home with her and a 20-year-old on scholarship at Iona College, and
the younger child has been gaining weight, she lamented, “because
nutritious food is expensive.” Carmen applied for food stamps in May for
the first time, after her unemployment benefits ran out and she was
granted temporary emergency assistance. But her plea for more prolonged
help has been pending and pending. She visits the SNAP offices twice a
week to try to move things along and in the interim has relied on
friends who have been generous offering food.
As his days in office dwindle, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has been
reminding us of his unimpeachable faith in the value of attracting the
very rich to the city. The more of them there are, he believes, the
better off those in the lower rungs will be, a claim challenged by the
fact that although more wealthy people moved to New York during his
tenure, the poverty rate did not decline. It is doubtful that among the
friends helping Carmen are any of the billionaires the mayor calls such a
“godsend.”
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